various views and interests excite jealousies and
contentions, which, aided by the passions peculiar to a barbarous people,
inevitably produce hostilities, and the effusion of human blood.

What we have hitherto known of this country undoubtedly proves that wars
are carried on with the most sanguinary violence: their prisoners, by the
customs of the country, are consigned to massacre, slavery, and
sacrifice,[1] to gratify the avarice, vanity, and cruelty of their chiefs;
one of these passions must be predominant, and therefore the question is,
which of them is the least pregnant with evil? It cannot admit of a doubt
that those who are victims to avarice meet a more mild and humane fate, in
falling into the hands of Europeans, than the unhappy portion who are
sacrificed to vanity and cruelty; and it is equally true, that since the
interior nations have been enabled to exchange their slaves for European
merchandize, the number of victims to the latter passion has decreased. I
am far from being the advocate of slavery, but I am stating a fact, and
leave it to the reader to form his own conclusions. Where confirmed habits
and immemorial custom is to be supplanted, it is certainly requisite to be
well acquainted with the nature and character of the natives, which I have
not here introduced in an exaggerated shape, but infinitely within the
bounds of their savage ferocity.

From these sources alone have arisen the expedients attendant upon the
slave trade; kidnapping and petty warfare form a very unimportant branch of
the barbarism which governs the inhabitants of Africa, and their enslaved
condition.

Viewing this in the mass of moral evil which disgraces the character of
man, it will be found that it is even disproportioned to the estimated
population of Africa, which, from the best authority, has been stated at
upwards of 160 millions; and to apply the consideration to our own
situation, it will be found, that the number of executions and
transportations from the United Kingdom, in proportion to its population,
is infinitely greater than the number of slaves exported from the shores of
Africa, to its numerous inhabitants. Unquestionably the slave trade has
extricated a number of human beings from death, whom the horrible
sacrifices before described consigned to a barbarous exit, and has been a
cause, though an immoral one when applied to Britons, of extricating many
victims, who otherwise would have been annually sacrifi